60 O d " 0" d young WI ows, companIons, an middle-aged women. Her advertise- ments promised "beautiful ladies of charm and class, for company, conver- satIon, or . . ." For five hundred pias- tres-about two and a half dollars-a customer had the right to look through her album of photographs. Another five hundred entitled him to meet a girl and look her over at the office of the agency. For fifteen hundred, a date would be arranged.. If a marriage en- sued, Miss Lee took a further cut of twenty-five hundred pIastres. The fol- lowIng advertIsement shows what Miss Lee is reduced to today In the way of offering services: - - - ------------ .........-- I - - - -- -, MISS LEE: - Needs to buy AIR- CONDITIONERS cI CARS Top prices paid. -Has tAR FOR RENT monthly weekly, daily with Insurance: TOYOTA, MAZDA, DATSUN. VOLKSWA. GEN,JEEP, MICROBUS Sedan. Pick-up, mle- robus)-GOOD CONDI- TION, SEASONABLE PRICES. -SERVANTS, COOKS. DRIVER LICENCE - VILLAS AP ART- MENTS. HOUSES ' FOR RENT Please Asic for- MISS LEE 12...Bis Chi-Lang GIA-DINH PTT: 23.637 Daily, 08.00 2-000 1 incJuding Sundays I and Holidays - - - - ..... -..._- Inevitably, the departure of the Americans has also meant the closing down of many bars, hotels, night clubs, and restaurants in the main sections of Saigon that have thrived on G.I. patronage. Some of these places, hoping to attract the Americans' young Viet- namese hangers-on, have changed their names from such things as Tennessee Bar , Texas, or G .1. Dolly to Viet- namese ones-street names or the names of local movie heroes or heroines. One straitlaced Vietnamese I know, who regards the presence of the G .1.s as a necessary evil but the self- degradation of his young countrymen 'lS an unnecessary one, said of this transformation, "The rats have taken over." There is also literal truth in this statement.. The rat population has in- creased tremendousl} in the last two years, despite improvements in the garbage-collection system One ';eeS rats by the hundreds, especially at night, even around the best restaurants and homes, scurrying across streets, chasing and jumping over each other. O\ving to a sad lack of medical facilities-there are approximately five hundred regis- tered M.D.s in Saigon, along with hundreds of Chinese practitioners-ill- nesses caused by filth and rats al e a mounting problem. In 1968, the in- fant-mortality rate was one in twenty; today, of twenty thousand recorded deaths each month more than half are those of children under five. A lart?;c number of deaths, particularly those of infants, go unrecorded. (It recently was revealed, incidentally, that some Saigon surgeons, who had earlier been sent to the United States for training as Army doctors, were devoting much of their talent and time to cosmetic sur- gery on loca] women who wanted to look more Occidental.) DespIte all this, and beneath the unrest that one feels today in Saigon- only a fraction of which takes the form of overt demonstrations by students, veterans, and others-one senses some- thing else: an Intense determination to endure. Again and again, the Vietnam- ese reveal a capacity for surviving almost dnything: poverty, disease, bombed-out homes, loss of members of the family. Everywhere, Americans be- moan our failures and condemn both the Vietnamese and themselves either for becoming so deeply involved in the war to begin with or for not having fought "the right kind of war." There is a constantly growing awareness among the Americans in Saigon of the policies that have led us to disaster- and the publication of the Pentagon Papers, of course, added to this. But the Vietnamese think differently; among the Vietnamese in Saigon, the Pentagon Papers scarcely caused a ripple They tended to shrug the reve- lations off with typica] fatahsm and cynicism. Whatever they now think of us, their attitude is expressed over and over again in the words "We will survive. We have always survived." S AIGON may be the most heavily pol- luted city in the world, not exclud- ing New York or Los Angeles There are approximately a million registered vehicles in the area, and probably at least as many more come and go. In addi- tion to private cars, small Renault taxis, and buses, there are several thou- sand three-wheeled motor scooters and many thousand three-wheeled pousse- pousses-motorized versions of pedi- cabs. AU these smaller motor vehicles, as well as 111any of the larger ones, use kerosene or low-grade gasoline for fuel, so the Saigon air is constantly fun of smoke and fumes, and a haze never leaves the sky.. To make matters worse, there are noW thousands of motor- cycles, almost all Japanese-made, which swarm like locusts and make life more hazardous than ever for pedestrians. A wild Jet Set of Honda-riding youths races down Tu Do each night, or along the Bien Hoa Highway, outside town, and then the young men pile their motorcycles on the sidewalks while they go to cafés or movies. The city now has a considerable number of tt affic ligh ts, bu t in man y places streams of vehicles still seem to come from all directions at once, and the ability to maneuver across a bus) street at the height of the morning, noon, or evening rush hour is the mark of a veteran resident.. From my window at the Continen- tal, I am mesmerized by the noise and vanety of the traffic flow and pedestri- an dash. Roaring convoys of American- made trucks, driven either by G.I.s or by Vietnamese, are likely to he followed by screaming police cars escortin g some high government official or rushing to some neW disaster. Anlid an this, slnall blue taxis scuttle about like water bugs, and motorcycles dart in and out.. Vietnamese women seem to handle motorcycles more skillfully than men- or, at least, less dangerously. They sit straight and prim in the saddle, often wearing colorful little hats, and their natural grace is even enhanced by their adept conti 0] of the sputtering ma- chines. 'T'he motorcycles serve as fami- ly jitneys, taking children to school and parents to work. Partly owing to the kerosene fumes-and to the fact that some of the kerosene containers were once used for defoliants-Saigon has lost many of its lovely old trees; others have been cut down to widen the streets. The fumes have also affected the normal bird population. A friend of mine bounced into my room one afternoon recently, exclaiming, "Guess what! I just saw a pigeon." I N the past few years, Saigon has acquIred an elaborate hippie culture and language. The hippies are cate- gorized by age groups. A hippze choi choi (" choi" means "play") is a very voung hippie, a teenybopper; a hippie X01n xom is a twenty-year-old boy or girl, and a hippie lau lau is an old-time